Rex Smith: Obamacare? It’s complicated

It’s not that the Supreme Court doesn’t matter — goodness knows, Antonin Scalia, for one, has projected the notion that nobody in America could be more essential than he is — but most Americans had their minds made up about the Affordable Care Act long before the nation’s top court was asked to rule on the Obama administration’s biggest legislative victory.

Of course, if you ask a typical voter to explain what so-called Obamacare does, you’ll likely hear something pretty vague. More so now than ever: In the two-plus years since its passage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s tracking polls, the proportion of Americans who understand the law’s provisions has dropped sharply.

And whose fault is that? Mine, it seems.

Not literally. I hope not to display symptoms of that particular mental illness marked by delusions of grandeur. But there are folks lining up to blame the mainstream news media for “the failure to explain health reform,” as Columbia Journalism Review put it last week, so I feel it’s only reasonable to get in line for my whacking.

Mind you, we’re also reminded regularly that the so-called legacy media matter less nowadays — that the proliferation of news sources in the digital age makes organizations like newspapers less relevant. But roughly two-thirds of the people in this community get at least some news from the Times Union each week, so I figure we’re due for at least a bit of the blame or credit for what people here know about important issues.

I’m still stinging from the scolding of several readers in the summer of 2009, as the debate was gripping Congress and the Tea Party movement was just gaining its footing. We published a well-intentioned effort to explain the myths and realities of the issues in play. The article was direct, making the point, for example, that there was in fact no provision in the legislation establishing “death panels,” then a major talking point of the bill’s critics.

This stab at clarity, I was instructed, was nothing more than a biased attack aimed at shoring up support for President Barack Obama. Minds, it seemed, were already made up.

Perhaps that’s one reason why that kind of coverage seems to have been a departure from the norm nationally. The Pew Foundation-funded Project for Excellence in Journalism found that during the height of the health care debate in Congress, less than a quarter of the news coverage of the issue dealt with descriptions of the plans; twice as much dealt with politics and strategy or the legislative process.

You might observe that those who favored the bill did a lousy job of explaining it. Nancy Pelosi, who was then the House speaker, put a horse behind its cart, I’d say, when she declared, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.” Most Americans probably feel that people shouldn’t have to wait for a bill to become law before understanding it.

All along, though, the complexity of the legislation has gotten in the way of explanation. Reporters usually try to use language that a typical reader can understand, but that can lead to adoption of simplistic terms that subtly bias the coverage. PEJ noted that terms used by opponents, like “government-run,” have been far more prevalent in news articles than language typically offered by its supporters, including “pre-existing conditions” and “more competition.”

But even thoughtful explanation may not help people understand what all the hullabaloo is about. In his book “The Information Diet,” software developer Clay Johnson cites studies by political scientists revealing that there’s a so-called “backfire effect” when people are presented with facts that conflict with their political biases — that more information from the other side actually makes some people more sure of what they believe.

That reinforces what psychologists know about how the brain fires when it uncovers information that batters its preconceptions.

Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist, has used functional magnetic resonance imaging to reveal that parts of the brain associated with reasoning shut down when people are confronted with “emotionally threatening information” about their political preferences. We like to cling to what we think we know.

As a model of how a politician can move an electorate, Westen cites Lyndon Johnson’s passionate speech in 1965 that roused the Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. By that reasoning, though, you have to wonder how an orator as gifted as Barack Obama has remained unable to sway more Americans to support his view on health care.

Maybe a better place to look is LBJ’s prodigious skills at pushing the levers in Congress. Perhaps a president with more political skills — someone with the acumen of New York’s current governor, say? — could have gotten us beyond stumbling over the language of the health care debate, which is where press and public alike seem to have been stymied.

Maybe then it wouldn’t be the nine justices of the Supreme Court who will have the last word, at least for now.

11 Responses

I think that you should have taken the time and space required for this post to actually outline the bill instead of talking about how your newspaper doesn’t do enough to explain the provisions of the affordable care act.

If your stab at clarity was perceived to be a biased attack aimed at shoring up support for President Barack Obama, then perhaps, that’s exactly what it was. It’s not as though we’ve come to expect actual fairness from the Times Union. Your reputation precedes you and you have earned the suspicion and apprehension of your readers one left-leaning editorial at a time. The so-called Observation Deck on the TU website is a daily litany of some of the most extreme liberal propaganda culled from every left-wing-nut publication in the English speaking world. You are only reaping what you have sown.

Obama Care compels private citizens to buy a product from private companies (at several thousand dollars per year) even if they do not want the product. Haven’t you lefties told us over and over again that it is WRONG to use the coercive power of the state to force people to do something they do not want to do? If Congress can make laws that force people to buy a product they do not want, then please tell us what Congress CAN’T do? How complicated is that? What part of “compelled” and “coercive” are us dummies out here in fly-over country failing to understand?

And let’s not forget the unprecedented arm-twisting used to pass Obama Care. The only reason Obama Care passed is because of the outright bribery and intimidation used against the Senators from Louisiana and Nebraska and the parliamentary maneuvering and rule bending (breaking?)by Pelosi and Reid. And the American people have known all along and watched in horror while our legislative process was corrupted by these ultra-partisan political hacks. The elections of 11/2/10 were a DIRECT result of the American people saying with a loud, clear and collective voice “We Don’t Want This!!!”

And the difference between Obama and LBJ in 1965 is simple. LBJ was doing what was right. Right for America and morally right for all people. Obama and his health care fiasco are wrong for America, on many, many, many levels.

So don’t lose any sleep over how you did your job Rex. I’m quite certain you did your liberal best to sell Obama Care and give your full editorial support to this incompetent Administration. Fortunately those of us who still value freedom and liberty have alternatives to your brand of news.

Gee, aren’t we lucky there are those around who “who still value freedom and liberty”, who find funneling wealth to the top, through a corrupted health insurance industry, worth denying 40+ million citizens meaningful health care, just because they do not fit into the profit expectations skimmed off the top, all to feed the greed of stockholders. When so much is skimmed off in duplicitous and unnecessary treatment (to pad the take), multiple and confusing record keeping, no leverage on costs, and a scheme to drive premiums to the limits that many cannot bear, I can see how a corporate shill might think the lining of his pocket is a patriotic location that must be defended at all costs. The question is, can society bear that cost to the national health?

I couldn’t have said it better myself #2. I cringe every time I read an editorial in the TU, knowing full well that it will be to the far left on every single issue not just nationally but unfortunately locally as well. I have vowed to never purchase the paper for this reason, and I never will.

…I got it. I just didn’t want to say he is “cheap.” It’s like those who say: “I don’t like steak, unless you buy me one.” or “I’m on a diet, but since you’re buying…..” On the other hand, is he trying to be a “I’m better than you. I don’t read newspapers”?
P.S. I’m not a “lib”, whatever that is.

Before all the Right-wing drones get their shorts all in a bunch over what Roberts did today, maybe they should consider this, it is what happened. Justice Roberts acted today to preserve the court as a convenient tool for insuring that corporate wealth would have a platform from which to launch further attacks against anyone who opposes corporate rule. Had Roberts let the vote go 5 to 4 against, the backlash against the Court and any further actions they may take in service to their uber-wealthy owners, would have coalesced in a massive grass-roots movement of people who, in absolute distrust of the Court, would act in November, to put Obama easily into a second term, take back both Houses of Congress, and make sure that Corporate serving prostitutes never get appointed to the Court again. He realized this fact and his is action was not the heroic act being portrayed by people like Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, but a tactic of desperation, taken to protect corporate gains and little more than tossing the Progressives a bone just to shut them up, while the Right resets their timetable and future tactics. Roberts and the Right are not to be trusted. They are stealing the electoral process, by allowing money absolute power (“Citizens United, and the striking down of the Wyoming law), and we shall see how they vote when the voter fraud being carried out in the name of the absolute lie of protecting us from voter fraud, finally gets on their docket.